By Bob Benenson, CQ Staff

Successful national campaigns, including those for control of the U.S. Senate and House, involve parties maximizing their opportunities in the states and districts that appear at least potentially winnable for them. The Republicans, during their congressional ascendancy in the 1990s and early part of this decade, were better at “spreading the playing field,” meaning that they recruited enough strong candidates to put additional Democratic seats into play. As the fortunes of the major parties reversed, beginning with the 2006 election cycle, the Democrats became the more adept party at expanding their list of competitive bids to take over the other party’s seats.

But the recruiting game, and the partisan balance of power in Congress that results from the outcomes of each cycle’s elections, is not just about opportunities made, but also about opportunities lost. In every campaign year, there always are several races that looked at least on paper like they could be competitive — but in which one of the parties was forced to forgo a serious challenge because they failed to find a strong candidate.

And, not surprisingly, a party that is perceived as being on the political defensive is going to have a harder time persuading would-be congressional hopefuls that this would be a GREAT year for them to take the plunge. In this campaign year, as in 2006, it was the Republican Party facing that tough sales job, which explains why the list of candidate recruiting foul-ups is dominating by contests in places where Democrats — quite unexpectedly, in some cases — are cruising to election victories this November over lackluster Republican competition, or no opposition at all.

In fact, the near-certainty that the Democrats would maintain control of both the Senate and the House that they won in the 2006 elections and the strong likelihood that they would gain additional seats were dies cast early in the campaign cycle, when Republicans’ efforts to recruit top-tier candidates came up dry.

The list below of this year’s top recruiting bloopers is alphabetical by state, simply because I was having too hard a time trying to rank-order them. How, really, do you choose between the Republicans in politically competitive Arkansas failing to find any candidate at all to run against a first-term incumbent who won last time with a modest 54 percent of the vote — and the epic screw-up in New York’s 13th District, where the GOP’s effort to replace scandal-plagued incumbent Vito Fossella resulted in a first replacement who then died suddenly, and a second who is such a hit that party officials tried to muscle him off the ballot in a last-ditch bid to reinstate the politically damaged Fossella?

Arkansas Senate: The odds weren’t especially great for the Republicans to upset first-term Democrat Mark Pryor . Arkansas, though conservative-leaning, has been less inclined to reject its historical Democratic Party ties and shift Republican than the rest of the South, and Pryor has a sturdy center-right profile and a popular last name inherited from David Pryor, a former governor and senator. But you’d have thought the Republicans could have could come up with someone to run, as Arkansas twice favored George W. Bush for president and Pryor’s 2002 win by 54 percent to 46 percent over Republican Sen. Tim Hutchinson, though solid, was not overwhelming. Nonetheless, the GOP failed to fill their ballot slot, leaving Pryor as the only senator this year running for re-election with no opposition from the other major party.

Iowa Senate: Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin has a liberal populist approach that pushes the partisan envelope a bit in Iowa, a state split so closely down the middle that it went narrowly against Bush in 2000 and narrowly for him in 2004. In each of his first four Senate elections dating back to 1984, Harkin faced a tough challenge from an incumbent Republican U.S. House member, and though he won each time, it was never by a landslide. His 54 percent to 44 percent edge over Republican Greg Ganske in 2002 was typical. Yet this year, Republican officials tried but failed to get either of the state’s two GOP House members, Tom Latham or Steve King , to pick up the torch against Harkin. Instead, their nominee is businessman Christopher Reed, who is little-known and underfunded.

Louisiana’s 3rd District: This House contest was another one the Republicans completely punted this year, fielding no candidate even though Democratic incumbent Charlie Melancon had to fight to win each of his previous two races in this south-central Louisiana district. When Melancon ran in 2004, he defeated Republican Billy Tauzin III, the retiring incumbent’s son, by just four-tenths of a percentage point. Melancon then faced a vigorous campaign in 2006 before vanquishing Republican state Sen. Craig Romero by 55 percent to 40 percent. Bush carried this conservative-leaning district with 58 percent in his 2004 presidential race.

New York’s 13th District: It would be hard to imagine a party organization having a worse year, and being less prepared to deal with it, than the Republicans in the district made up mainly of the New York City borough of Staten Island with a chunk of Brooklyn attached. Republican Rep. Vito Fossella’s 57 percent of the vote in 2006 was a career low, but his party assumed he would run again and win — until a chain of events that became with his arrest on a drunken driving charge in May led to the revelation that Fossella, a married father of three, also was the unmarried father of a daughter from an extramarital affair. After Fossella quit his re-election bid, and after several well-known Republican figures turned down party entreaties to run, the GOP turned to former Wall Street executive Frank Powers, who within weeks died of a heart attack. With time running out before the July candidate filing deadline, the Staten Island Republicans opted for former state Rep. Robert Straniere, even though several top borough Republicans disparaged him for living in Manhattan. To make this an even bigger fiasco, some Republicans thought it would be a better idea to put Fossella back on the ballot, even though he publicly insisted he would not run, and tried unsuccessfully to persuade Straniere to step aside before the withdrawal deadline Wednesday.

New York’s 19th District: John Hall ’s 51 percent to 49 percent upset of Republican Rep. Sue W. Kelly in New York’s lower Hudson Valley was one of the more surprising results in 2006. Although Hall was a longtime local Democratic activist, and gained publicity value from his past as the lead singer of the 1970s pop group Orleans, he had to overcome a longstanding Republican lean in a district that had gone 53-45 for Bush just two years earlier. So the GOP put him on its target list, only to have their recruited candidate, businessman Andrew Marshall Saul, who quickly raised $1.5 million — then dropped out of the race, citing personal reasons. The nomination instead went to Kieran Michael Lalor, an Iraq war veteran and political newcomer, whom Hall had outraised by more than 5-to-1 ($1.9 million to $376,000) as of Aug. 20.

Ohio’s 18th District: Republican diehards were entitled to describe Democrat Zack Space as something of a fluke winner after he captured the eastern Ohio district that had been held for a dozen years by Republican Bob Ney — who quit the race in August 2006 and copped a guilty plea on corruption charges related to his ties to disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Space, after all, was a previously little-known local official who won with 62 percent on Republican-leaning turf that in 2004 had given 57 percent to Bush. Yet GOP efforts to find a big-name Republican to run fell short. Their primary winner, Fred Dailey, is a former state agriculture secretary, but his weak earlier fundraising ($278,000 to the incumbent’s $1.8 million at mid-year) allowed Space to establish himself as a strong favorite to win a second term.

Pennsylvania’s 6th District The fact that the Democrats’ recruiting machine is much better oiled than the Republicans is underscored by my survey of the CQ Politics reporters who cover the congressional races, which produced this as the best example of a Democratic setback. Even this race — in a district linking Philadelphia suburbs and exurbs in southeastern Pennsylvania that is closely divided between the parties —is hardly a match for some of the Republican snafus listed here. Democrats had hoped to make another serious run as Republican Rep. Jim Gerlach , who won his three previous House races by the same exact 51 percent to 49 percent outcome. But retired businessman Bob Roggio, though not completely out of competition, so far has not made as strong a push as the hard-charging Democratic candidates Gerlach previously faced, and he has raised much less money.

South Dakota Senate: Republicans in generally GOP-leaning South Dakota were feeling at the top of their game after the 2004 election in which former Rep. John Thune narrowly unseated Democrat Tom Daschle, then the Senate Democratic leader, and they were anxious to turn their sights to Democratic Sen. Tim Johnson in his expected bid for a third Senate term in 2008. He had just barely escaped defeat in 2002, as Thune warmed up for his Daschle race by holding Johnson to a 524-vote margin. And Republican officials hoped popular GOP Gov. Michael Rounds , who was easily re-elected in 2006, might take up the challenge to Johnson. But the near-fatal brain hemorrhage that Johnson suffered in December 2006, and his courageous comeback to return to his Senate duties and the campaign trail, changed everything. With Rounds taking himself out of the mix early, the Republicans nominated a relatively low profile state representative named Joel Dykstra, who at mid-year had about 10 percent of the fundraising receipts and about one-fortieth the cash on hand that Johnson had compiled.